Blinking as if she were coming out of a deep sleep, Diamond Tiara stared at Dean Cadance.

Candie only smiled, of course. Most people found how quick she was to smile endearing, not seeing the expression for the predatory grin that it was. Cadance, for her part, found herself grinning awkwardly back.

The whole uncomfortable situation was balanced on the edge of a knife. Cadance wasn't just some student whose disappearance might be explained away. If the Dean of Crystal Prep suddenly vanished, people would notice and start asking questions. Perhaps that was why Candie didn't attack? Diamond Tiara knew by now that eventually the arithmetic of 'risk verses reward' would eventually fall on the reward side of Candie's insatiable appetite, so she moved quickly to seize the chance to escape.

Diamond Tiara was off the floor, grabbing Dean Cadance's wrist and leading the adult out of the chemistry lab in a flash, "Leave this to me, alright 'cuz'?" she called over her shoulder. She had no idea if Candie really understood her or not. If the monster suspected that Diamond Tiara was just trying to get away or save Cadance, it was likely she'd attack at a moments notice. To her surprise, Candie just watched her go, the grin never leaving her face.

"Whoa, hey, what's the rush?" asked Cadance.

"You said you needed to see me immediately, right? So lets go immediately and get this over with." And if that let them put as much distance between them and the voracious Candie as possible, all the better.

This was a rare opportunity. Dean Cadance wasn't her first choice of authority figure to go to, but maybe if she could convince her of what was going on they might be able to work out a way to... To what exactly?

Stop Candie?

That didn't seem likely. Even if they could think of a way to capture or kill her, they'd be risking not only their lives but every other student's in the school.

Escape?

That was slightly more viable. But Candie had a nasty habit of showing up just when Diamond Tiara was trying to sneak away. The horrid thing seemed to have a sixth sense for that kind of thing.

"Um, could we maybe stop for a moment?" Cadance inquired, out of breath.

"Why? I thought you wanted to see me in your office?"

"I do, it's just that my office is in the other direction."

Diamond Tiara blushed red, but didn't offer an apology or even admit to the mistake. She just continued to march the adult down the hallway, now in the opposite direction, until they arrived at the door with a brass plaque that read "Dean Mi Amore Cadenza".

It didn't take long for Cadance to compose herself once she was behind her desk.

While Diamond Tiara had been her typically impatient and pushy self, Cadance was actually glad she didn't have to struggle with the girl to get her into her office. She'd expected some resistance from the willful rich girl before, but as she settled into the chair in front of Cadance's desk (a much more comfy one than the stool that Principal Cinch offered students) she could tell that there was something the student wanted to get off her chest. Despite this, it was probably best to get her business out of the way first before hearing what was on the girls mind.

"I think you know why your here," began Cadance, dropping a thin file folder on the desk in front of her and opening it, "And how the reason has less to do with you and more to do with your cousin."

The teenagers face was blank, but there was an almost hopeful look around her eyes. Cadance pressed on.

"There's no record of your cousin ever being enrolled at this school. Nor is there any record of her being enrolled anywhere else," the Dean added. "Indeed, while she has become somewhat popular with her teachers, they've all noticed her odd behavior and the strange occurrences since the two of you arrived. Frankly I'm not sure how we managed to let this go on for this long." That wasn't entirely true. Since Cadnace had access to the schools bank accounts, so she knew exactly how much Filthy Rich had 'donated' to Crystal Prep at the start of the school year. The phrase 'hush money' seemed accurate, but that was something she'd take up with Principal Cinch later on.

"I was beginning to think no one would ever figure it out," replied Diamond Tiara with a look of relief. "You have to understand, I wanted to tell someone, but Candie wouldn't let me."

"I can imagine. It must have been hard on you," Cadance said with compassion, and meant it. "Hiding the fact that your cousin is an illegal immigrant to this country must have been fairly nerve-wracking."

Diamond Tiara's mouth dropped open and hung there.

"What I don't understand is that, with your families wealth, why you don't just pay for her to get a green card legally," Cadance paused, thumbing through the paperwork at her fingertips. "It's not my place to ask for the details, but Crystal Prep is a school built on its reputation for excellence. If it was discovered that one of our students was in this country illegally and the school was thought to be complicit in sheltering her, it could severely effect our standing." Not to mention the effect it would have on donations from their more conservative alumni. What little boost they might get from their more progressive donors would hardly make up for it. "I won't go as far as to turn her over to the authorities, but we need to make this right. If that means expelling her, I'd rather avoid that, but since I think you've been acting as her guardian while she's been here I wanted to come to you and ask you if there was any way we could resolve this more delicately."

"I can't believe this!" Diamond Tiara threw her hands up in the air, clearly enraged. "Are you all such morons that you can't figure anything out at all!? Have you even noticed the missing students!?"

Taken aback, Cadance didn't know how to respond to this. She didn't know what bearing the subject of the absent students had on the matter at hand but, not for the first time, she felt her competense was under attack.

"Well of course I know about that! Crystal Prep always has a high turn over of students in the first semester. It's not the students fault if they can't keep up with the challenging curriculum we offer. My duty, however, is to the students that stick with the program," or at least that was how Principal Cinch put it. Truthfully, Cadance had found the alarming number of students vanishing odd, and found it odder still that their parents hadn't called to demand refunds of their tuition. Cinch had made sure Cadance didn't have time to follow up on that, but there was no way a student would know about that. "I don't see what that has to do with your situation."

"IT HAS EVERYTHING TO DO WITH MY SITUATION!!!" Diamond Tiara screamed. The teenager was on her feet, shaking with such rage that Cadance actually felt herself instinctively leaning away. As the young woman came around the side of her desk, breathing heavily, Cadance couldn't help but wonder if she ought to call for help. "That thing isn't an illegal alien, she's just an alien flat out! She's a monster! You want to know why so many students are missing? She's eating them! She's chopping them up, ripping them into pieces, and she's EATING THEM!!! I've been trying to tell someone the entire time I've been here, but every time I get close to someone she pops up and swallows them whole! And of course I can't rely on the rest of you to piece things together yourselves, because you're too obsessed with your reputations and on winning awards or attracting donations to realize you're being picked off one by one!"

Cadance was at a complete loss. Student break downs weren't unheard of at Crystal Prep, but she'd never seen a student as agitated as Diamond Tiara. Crystal Prep put a lot of strain on students to produce results, and sometimes even the most talented could crack under that pressure. However, in all her years of having to help pick up the pieces she had never seen a student that had become so utterly detached from reality!

There must have been something else going home, some trauma or some abuse, for this kind of outburst to occur. Cadance was actively cowering, holding up her file folder like a shield between herself and Diamond Tiara. "Now calm down, surely you must be... Mistaken." She had almost said 'crazy', but knew that was a bad idea.

"Mistaken? MISTAKEN!?" roared the teen. "You wanted to know what we were doing in that chem lab where you found us? Well a handful of upperclassmen drug me in there to bully and beat on me. They were going to try and blackmail me with some dirty photos they were going to take after they shaved off all my hair! But you know what my 'cousin' did? She murdered them! All of them! She laughed about it and played with them before she ripped them them apart and skinned them alive! She ate every last piece of them so that when you showed up there wasn't a scrap left! But I guarantee you if you asked their homeroom teachers where they were right now, Sunny Flare, Indigo Zap, Lemon Zest, Sugarcoat, and Sour Sweet are going to be nowhere to be found! And you know why? Because they never will be found again since they're dead and rotting in that monsters stomach!"

It seemed her rage was spent. The tears were coming now, in big ugly sobs. Despite the fear Cadance had of the teen mere moments ago, she felt compelled to wrap Diamond Tiara in a tight hug. Her story was... Well, unbelievable. Clearly some fantasy she had concocted to deal with a hard situation. But that didn't mean she was a bad girl, deep down.

Still... Maybe it would be worth checking in on the upperclassmen she had mentioned after all? Just to prove to her that this was all some kind of terrible misunderstanding.

"This doesn't make sense," Cadance muttered, furrowing her brow as yet another teacher reported one of the students Diamond Tiara had named to be unaccounted for. One or two might be a coincidence, but all of them? That seemed unlikely.

For Diamond Tiara should've been satisfying, seeing the look of bewilderment that was steadily giving rise to panic on Dean Cadance's face. After all, isn't this what she had been trying to do for weeks? Confide in someone the horrors she had been forced to live with on a daily basis? Yet as the knowledge of what she had done sunk in, it only opened a yawning pit in her stomach.

The chances were very good that by telling Cadance about Candie, Diamond Tiara had already signed both of their death warrants.

While she wasn't entirely sure what Candie was up to tonight, it was obvious that secrecy was paramount to her plans despite her reckless behavior. There was no doubt that if she thought her cover was jeopardized that she would kill both her and Cadance without hesitation, regardless of how suspicious it might look.

Worse still, there was a very good chance that she might go all out and just wipe out everyone at the school. Now that she had time to think about it, CHS may have suffered a similar fate last year. Was it possible that this was all connected, and this time Diamond Tiara was just in the middle of another soon to be school massacre?

If Diamond Tiara had unwittingly consigned another school and all of its students to a similar night of horrors, she wasn't sure how she would cope with that kind of guilt.

Then again, she might not live long enough for that to be a problem.

Even as she thought this, the teenager noticed a single drop of pink liquid drip down from the ceiling. As she watched, eyes wide with horror, more pink slime flowed out of the air conditioning vent, but instead of falling from above it spread like water filling a glass. A thin pool of flesh, covered in drooling mouths and glaring eyes, completely covered the offices ceiling. In moments, Candie's head and upper torso slid gently out of the pool, hanging upside down. She grinned as brightly as ever, and raised one finger to her mouth in a shushing motion as what passed for her hair took the form of long hooked spidery limbs.

As the monster dipped lower and lower, it was clear what she intended to do. Her face split down the middle, revealing rows of shark like teeth and tendrils that reached silently towards Cadance's head. The adult was oblivious to this, still busy making phone calls.

It was then that Diamond Tiara realized she had been given a choice.

If she allowed this to happen, she would be off the hook. Candie wouldn't know she had snitched on her, and while Dean Cadance's sudden disappearance might throw more suspicion their way, there was a good chance the monster would keep her alive to keep using her wealth and influence to further whatever dark plans it had. On the other hand, if she interfered now, if she so much as breathed a single word of warning, Candie would gobble her up right along with Cadance.

Her every instinct screamed to just let it happen.

If she'd found someone to confide in once, that meant she could do it again, and next time she'd make sure that they were far away from Candie and traveling at some speed before taking the risk a second time.

Which is why Diamond Tiara surprised even herself when she screamed, "Cadance, look out above you!"

The Dean glanced up reflexively and froze, her eyes growing wide as the telephone receiver dropped from her hand. The dry wheezing sound escaping from her throats was perhaps the closest she could manage to a scream while her mind tried desperately to process what she was seeing.

Fortunately Candie had frozen as well, the only motion from her were droplets of saliva that dropped from her long fangs and hissed as they ate into the wood of Cadance's desk. That didn't last long, however, as Candie's entire body opened like a razor ribbon flower; all teeth, claws, and tendrils spreading wide as the creature detached itself from the ceiling.

Cadance saw her life flash before her eyes as the wall of death fell on top of her. Then she felt a hard shove to her side, and her office chair rolled hard into her office door. Before she knew it, she was tipped over and sprawled out into the hall.

Instead of swallowing Cadance, the gloopy mass engulfed Diamond Tiara. Cadance could see her struggling inside the pink mass that clung to her like a thin skin of bubblegum. She writhed and jerked as she was torn to pieces, but even so Cadance could see her trying to escape.

It hurt worse than Diamond Tiara had imagined. It was like thousands of needles were being scraped all over her body at once. Her cloths offered little protection, and it wasn't long before she could feel questing tendrils slipping into her flesh and whipping through her veins. Worse, she was certain that she should be dead by now, from shock if from nothing else, but oblivion wouldn't come. There was just pain! Pain digging through her flesh and wriggling over her bones. She realized Candie was saving her head, and by extension her brain, for last.

The monster wanted to make sure she was spared none of her suffering.

One tiny arm pushed, reaching for Cadance, stretching beneath the coating of caustic slime. With an act of will that Cadance could only marvel at, Diamond Tiara's arm breached the surface of the monster. It was already melted down to the bone, but still she struggled until a shoulder and then most of her head were free.

Candie wasn't about to let her go though, and slimy tendrils studded with teeth were already wrapping around her, pulling her back into the burning depths from which she had emerged. That was why, with tendrils wrapped around her throat and tugging at her mouth she had some difficulty getting out the words, "RUN! YOU HAVE TO TELL THE OTHERS! YOU HAVE TO WARN EVERYONE!!!" She gagged violently as a tentacle forced its way down her throats and then expanded into a fist covered with long sharp spines that pushed their way outward and made her head resemble a pin cushion. Diamond Tiara's struggling stilled then, and she was swallowed up with a satisfied slurping noise.

Cadance found her voice then and screamed long and loud. She picked up her office chair and hurled it at the formless monstrosity. It didn't really do any damage, but it bought her enough time to make it to run for her life.

Cinch! I Have to get to Principal Cinch! She'll know what to do! was the thought that drove Cadance thundering past classrooms, leaving students and teachers alike peeking out of their doors to try and figure out what all the commotion was about. But there would be no time to warn the classes one by one. The controls for the PA system were in Principal Cinch's office. That was another reason to ignore the curious looks and run as fast as she could up stairs that she cursed with every footfall.

Why did Cinch insist on having her office on the top floor!?

Running harder than she had since her collage days, Cadance arrived at the Principal's door, panting for air. Decorum and professionalism could take a flying leap for all Cadance cared right now. She burst through the door and cried, "Emergency! It's an emergency! We have to evacuate the school immediately!"

But Principal Cinch didn't respond. Instead she sat quietly in her chair, facing away from Cadance.

"Abacus, did you hear what I said?" Cadance asked, exasperated. "There's some kind of monster... Or creature, eating students alive! We have to warn everyone and then call the police! Or maybe the army! We have to do something!"

"Calm yourself Dean. Take a deep breath," replied the headmistress at last. "And explain to me in detail why I shouldn't have your job for this rude and unannounced intrusion into my office."

Maybe it was that same, high and mighty condescending voice Cinch always used that did it. Or perhaps it was just a natural reaction to the shocking situation Cadance found herself in. Regardless of what it was that counted as the last straw, the camels back was thoroughly broken.

"Why you shouldn't have my job!?" Cadance voice shook with fury. "Well, maybe because I'm the only one on your staff that actually does anything! Maybe because I've been single-handedly tending to the needs of the students you ignore, unless you need to manipulate or blackmail them! Or maybe because this place would fall apart in a matter of days if I ever did what I've been wanting to do for years and just quit this thankless job! How dare you sit there and threaten me when the students lives... are... in danger..."

The dean couldn't help but finished weakly, as her eyes came to rest on the thoroughly smashed controls for the Public Announcement system.

"My, my, such wild accusations. Next you'll be spouting some nonsense about the staff at this school having been infiltrated by aliens from another dimension. We simply can't have you spouting such reckless nonsense."

As the head mistresses chair slowly rotated around, Cadance gasped in shock. Behind her horn-rimmed glasses, her eyes were missing! In their place, two long pink tendrils of translucent jelly curved like horns. The 'eye-stalks' for a lack of a better term swiveled in Cadance's direction as Principal Cinch smiled coldly.

"Fortunately, the dead usually can't speak."